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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26169895">hold your breath, let loose your heart</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/sublime_jumbles/pseuds/sublime_jumbles'>sublime_jumbles</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>cozy mystery au [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Penny Dreadful (TV)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Coffee Shops &amp; Cafés, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Small Town, Asexual Character, Belly Kink, Chubby Ethan, Extra Treat, F/M, Feeding Kink, Feelings Realization, Fluff, Food as a Metaphor for Love, Non-Sexual Kink, Psychic Abilities, Supernatural Elements, Weight Gain, Werewolves, admitting feelings, all Vanessas are ace Vanessas, brief mention of Dr. Seward bc going to therapy is good, she was a witch he owned a cafe what more can i say, the kinks in here are all suuuuuper super light, tight clothes</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-08-30</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-08-30</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 03:27:52</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>4,816</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26169895</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/sublime_jumbles/pseuds/sublime_jumbles</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Maybe it’s that seeing him without all of his customary layers feels a little like seeing him naked. But as she stares, she wrestles with the truth that’s slowly been making itself known to her since he got that book off the top shelf for her the other day: it’s </i>much <i>more because of the t-shirt he’s wearing, and that he obviously hasn’t sized it up since he started putting on weight. </i></p><p>or: Vanessa's confusing feelings for Ethan are helped along by a broken air conditioner, a considerable amount of ice cream, some werewolf stuff, and one tight t-shirt.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Ethan Chandler &amp; Vanessa Ives, Ethan Chandler/Vanessa Ives</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>cozy mystery au [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1998277</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>3</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>63</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>hold your breath, let loose your heart</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>this is inspired by a (not so) little au that my pal/faithful beta reader wy have been playing in! essentially: Ethan owns a small-town cafe a la Luke Danes, Vanessa is a coroner/medium who haunts his counter every morning for coffee and cake while she investigates mysterious deaths, and they have NO IDEA that they're gonna end up together.</p><p>yes, this IS in fact my THIRD fic that hinges on a cooling unit breaking down. what can i say? it's a good summer trope and the ONLY good things about heat waves are clingy clothes and ice cream.</p><p>title from "mile magnificent" by molly ofgeography (thanks wy for introducing me to it!).</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Summer days like these almost make Vanessa rethink her philosophy of dressing only in black, but she has a reputation to maintain, and if the local witch suddenly turned up in pastels — well, then people might talk to her at the grocery store, and she’s not altogether sure that she wants that. </p><p>Still, as she makes her way toward the cafe, she smiles at the brave souls working in their yards under the beating sun, pulling weeds and desperately watering gardens. The heat is treacherous, rising off the asphalt in waves that make the world look hazier than it normally would two days after a séance. </p><p>She isn’t much for iced coffee, but today she’s thinking of the huge, sweating mason jars of cold brew Ethan pours over ice, the sweet, nutty scent of it. A splash of milk swirled through, something cool to hold in her hands as she pages through the book about glyphs she began last week. Ethan won’t let her take it past the counter, despite her many and varied promises to return it unscathed. </p><p><em> The book </em>. She closes her eyes, slows her pace so she won’t stumble on the sidewalk. She cannot think about that book when she’s going to see him in five minutes.</p><p>She takes deep, measured breaths as she comes up on the cafe. There’s a staticky silver-gray aura of — not anxiety exactly. A harriedness, perhaps? — rolling out from the building, and she tries to focus on Ethan, the green thread of him amid the tapestry of town. He’s harried too, she understands, perhaps most of all, and she cocks her head, stepping up onto the cafe’s stoop.</p><p>She opens the door, but before she can go inside, a wave of thick, stuffy air hits her, as sweltering hot as the pavement outside. The cafe is barren of patrons, but the phone is ringing, the dull whir of fans wearing at the edges of her hearing. Ethan is rushing back and forth behind the counter, his hair falling out of its loose little bun. He’s stripped down to just a heathered blue t-shirt, his usual open button-down gone, and Vanessa stops, her knees suddenly weak as water. </p><p>Maybe it’s that seeing him without all of his customary layers feels a little like seeing him naked. But as she stares, she wrestles with the truth that’s slowly been making itself known to her since he got that book off the top shelf for her the other day: it’s much <em> more </em>because of the t-shirt he’s wearing, and that he obviously hasn’t sized it up since he started putting on weight.</p><p>The t-shirt clings <em> everywhere </em> : to the plump curves of his sides, the soft mound of his stomach, the dip of shadow where the fabric is stretched across his navel. His chest and the small of his back are dark with sweat, and Vanessa can <em> feel </em> how uncomfortable he is, how sticky and frustrated and <em> done </em>. There’s a strip of soft tanned skin just visible between the hem of his shirt and the waistband of his jeans, and it makes Vanessa’s breath catch in her throat, the way it feels like something stolen. </p><p>Ethan plucks his shirt away from his stomach, and Vanessa turns her head toward her shoulder in self-preservation. When she looks back, he’s answering the still-ringing phone, tucking it between his shoulder and jaw as he turns back toward the kitchen without noticing her.</p><p>He mustn’t have heard her come in over the blur of the fans, she realizes. She hangs in the doorway, frozen despite the oppressive heat on either side of her. She can feel every inch of herself beginning to catch at the edges like campfire kindling. Even from behind, there’s something about his shape that makes it difficult to breathe — the strong breadth of his shoulders giving way to the soft, tender swells of his sides, his shirt pulled taut in its struggle to stretch across his newfound heft.</p><p>She remembers how his stomach had jiggled last week when he’d reached to the top of the bookcase to grab the volume about glyphs for her, how he’d tugged the tails of his shirt down self-consciously afterward. Or — no. Not self-consciously. <em> Absently </em>, and that had somehow been even more tantalizing.</p><p>She darts back out of the cafe and into the sun, feeling for all the world like she’s at the center of a supernova. Is this how other people feel all the time, she wonders faintly, her thoughts returning to their collision course. How on <em> earth </em>do they live like this.</p><p>She almost sinks to the curb to ride out her feelings, but a flash of movement through the cafe’s front window makes her turn, and she realizes she can still see him bustling about, flipping chairs up onto tables and wiping down counters. It’s possible that she can’t actually <em> see </em>the way his stomach wobbles with each movement, but she imagines it must be so, and feels her fingernails dig into her palms. This sort of thing never happened when he was slimmer, she thinks, half wistful and half too thrilled to regret. She could just look at him like — like — like anyone else. </p><p>But it wouldn’t matter, she thinks, if anyone else put on some weight. It’s specifically that it’s <em> Ethan </em>, someone she already knows and likes. It feels strange, childish, to call her growing feelings a crush, but as she stands in front of the window, hugging herself to try and contain the giddy, bubbling feeling in her chest, it’s the closest thing she can liken it to.</p><p>And then Ethan catches her eye through the glass, and she startles, the ghost of her own reflection showing her just how caught out she looks. She unwraps her arms from her torso and fusses with her hair as if it’s what she’s been doing all along, and returns Ethan’s smile, mortified.</p><p>As soon as he turns back to his work, she drops onto the curb and digs a joint out of the tin in her bag. It feels blasphemous to add even another degree of heat to the day with her lighter, but the first pull of smoke is worth it to ground herself. </p><p><em> All right </em> , she concedes, exhaling. Maybe she <em> does </em>have a crush on Ethan. It sounds so silly, like she’s still in high school, excitement rising up shakily through her ribs when Mina laughed at something she said or grabbed her hand so as not to lose her in the hallway. </p><p>The other day, when he’d taken that book down for her, it had felt like the wind had been knocked out of her, like it had been legitimately, medically difficult to breathe for a moment. She hadn’t noticed it before — over the counter, not much had changed about him. Perhaps his face was a bit rounder, a bit fuller, his jawline a bit less defined, but by and large he looked the same as he always had. But when he’d moved farther into her line of sight, she’d caught a glimpse of the bulge that had gathered unnoticed at his waist, pushing against the buttons of his shirt. It had prickled at her, piquing her peculiar interest. She’d skimmed at his aura — nothing invasive, just to see if he’d eaten recently, if this was maybe bloat from an overambitious breakfast. But instead, there was an itch of hunger just starting in his stomach. So it <em> was </em>fat, she’d thought, leaning forward, a strange little itch starting in her own stomach.</p><p>And then he’d reached up for the book, and the bottom of his belly had fallen out of his shirt when it rode up, and it had turned her mouth dry with interest, but it was the tug at his shirt afterward that had truly sent her spinning. She’d wandered home that day picking the image apart, the reach and his bare skin and the way he had jiggled, his automatic tug of his shirt over the new push of his stomach. It <em> had </em>to still be new, and yet he’d already resigned himself to the fact that his shirt didn’t quite fit anymore. She’d fallen asleep thinking about it, woken imagining the curve of his stomach pressed against her back, and it had driven her so wild in the days afterward that she had taken two extra séance appointments just to think about anything else, even though they’d wrung her out so badly she’d had to take another two days off work just to recover.</p><p>Now, the bell on the cafe door chimes behind her, and Vanessa stiffens. Ethan’s boots appear next to her a moment later, and then the rest of him, entering her periphery hips-first. She keeps her gaze anchored straight ahead, on the Sweets’ trash cans at the curb across the street. In her lap, she squeezes her free hand into a fist so tightly that her joints protest.</p><p>“Hey,” he says, nudging her at her knee with something cold. She glances over: an iced coffee in a plastic to-go cup, a swirl of milk tendrilling through it like roots. “Made you this. The AC’s fucked and I didn’t brew any hot today, so it’ll have to do.”</p><p>Her heart frogs in her chest as she takes the coffee, that same slippery, wriggling feeling of what could be attraction, if she were a different kind of girl. “Thank you,” she manages, chancing a sideways glance at him. His stomach is piled in his lap, the fabric of his shirt creased between the soft puff of his chest and the pudge of his belly. “Is everything all right?”</p><p>He nods, resting his forearms on his knees and squishing his belly up against his thighs. “I’ve got someone coming to fix it, but she won’t be here until later.”</p><p>He smells like sweat and coffee grounds and the usual clean blue scent of his deodorant, and his face is flushed, damp. Sometimes she looks at him and can’t understand how she didn’t see him this way before now, but it’s always been like that for her: she never realizes how much she likes someone until she’s in so deep she can’t touch the bottom.</p><p>She offers him the joint, then pulls it back. “I forgot you’re still on the clock.”</p><p>“Nah,” he says, taking it and bringing it to his lips. He takes a long drag, then blows the smoke out gently, bringing the hand with the joint up to brush at his forehead with his wrist again. Vanessa keeps her eyes determinedly on her coffee. “I closed up at noon. Executive decision. It’s hot as fuck in there, I can’t make anyone work like that.”</p><p>He sucks at the joint again, then passes it back. “You out here for any particular reason?” he asks, tipping his head toward her. “You’re gonna get heatstroke, wearing all that black.”</p><p>She sips her iced coffee. It’s cool and smooth, a touch of lavender syrup bringing a flutter of floral sweetness. It’s so thoughtful that it almost makes her sad: despite how overwhelming his morning must have been, he still did his best to recreate her usual latte. </p><p>“Just gathering my thoughts,” she says truthfully. “Trying to figure out where else I could find some cake and companionship at this hour on a Tuesday.”</p><p>He makes an amused little sound beside her and leans back on his hands. “Companionship I can help you with. Especially if you wanna get out of the sun.”</p><p>“Could I interest you in some ice cream?” she asks, even though it feels like a step off the high dive and into freefall. “You deserve a treat, I think, after suffering all morning in that heat.”</p><p>The sound he makes is so interested and so tender that she almost regrets asking. <em> Almost </em>. </p><p>“I could crush some ice cream,” he says decisively, and she takes a long, cold pull of iced coffee to steady herself.</p><p>“Well, all right, then,” she says, rising from the curb and offering him a hand up. He takes it, and she tries not to think about the weight he’s gained as she helps haul him to his feet. Does he <em> feel </em>heavier? Ethan is so much larger than she is to begin with, taller and broader and sturdier — he must have nearly a hundred pounds on her, she guesses, and she draws in her breath so sharply that he glances back at her, concerned. </p><p>“Nothing,” she says quickly. “Just a bit warm.”</p><p>Ethan scoffs, pulling the elastic from his hair and retying his untidy little bun. “I’m the last person with room to critique your style, but you think your color palette has anything to do with that?”</p><p>“Oh, stop,” she says, swatting at him as they fall into step together. “I have a very particular aesthetic to maintain; I can’t turn my back on it now. What would people think?”</p><p>He flicks the wide, floppy brim of her black sunhat. “That you’re trying to survive a heat wave like the rest of us, maybe.”</p><p>She eyes him, grinning. “My reputation in this town very much depends on my <em> not </em>being like the rest of you.”</p><p>Ethan’s smile softens, a subtle shift of his eyebrows and the shape of his mouth as he moves from teasing to tender. “We like you that way,” he says, so assured that it unmoors her a little.</p><p>She falls a few steps behind him, fussing with the laces on her blouse as heat rises in her cheeks. She’s hit again by how lovely he looks even from the back, the roll of his hips and the faint jiggle of his sides as he moves, the comfortable, settled look his extra weight gives him. She wants to hug him from behind just to see what it would feel like, to rest her cheek against his soft shoulder and cradle the plump curve of his belly in her arms. Touching him always feels so <em> safe </em>, so reassuring, and as she takes quick steps to catch up to him, she thinks about how sweet it would be to walk with her hand in his steady grip. </p><p><em> Stop it </em> , she tells herself, <em> don’t be weird, </em>but not being weird is a tall order for Vanessa Ives.</p><p>It feels a bit like playing hooky, meandering down the empty streets with him on a Tuesday afternoon when ordinarily they would both be at work. He recounts the misery of the cafe’s morning to her, pausing for effect and ratcheting up the drama to make her laugh, and she can’t even mind the sun pouring down on them when she’s enjoying the walk so much that she feels like a tiny sun herself.</p><p>Ethan pulls his shirt away from his belly again, a series of quick plucks that can’t be effective, and Vanessa chews her lower lip. He catches her glance, and before she can look away, he says, “I know, I know, I look like a mess. Occupational hazard.”</p><p>“No,” she says, drawing it out so he might not be able to tell if she’s serious. “You look like you’ve had a very trying morning, perhaps.”</p><p>His grin is crooked, amused. “So, a mess.”</p><p>She winks at him impishly. “But a hardworking one.”</p><p>“You’ve got an answer for everything,” he says fondly, shaking his head as they reach Marjorie’s. “You wanna eat inside, or in the shade?”</p><p>“Shade,” she replies. It might be cooler inside, but it feels less pressurized somehow to be outside, like the wildness of the dandelions and Queen Anne’s lace growing by the picnic tables gives her longing more room to spread out. </p><p>“Order anything you like,” she says as they step to the window, hoping to herself that the heat and the frustration of the day won’t hold him to modesty. “My treat.”</p><p>“<em> Anything </em>?” he teases, his eyes crinkling at the corners. “Even one of those giant sundaes they’re always pushing?”</p><p>Vanessa nearly chokes on her sip of coffee. “If that’s what you want.”</p><p>“Nah,” he says, and a little bubble of hope deflates in her chest. “I can’t make you pay twelve dollars for ice cream in good faith, even if you’re offering.”</p><p>“I’ll do it,” she threatens playfully, moving toward the window, and Ethan grabs her wrist, laughing.</p><p>“No, no, Vanessa — you don’t need to pay for me.”</p><p>“I want to,” she says stubbornly, because it feels like a way to both stoke and quench the flame in the pit of her belly. “You serve me breakfast every day and I pay you for it, don’t I? Let me buy you something once.”</p><p>He relents, dropping her arm, and shakes his head. “All right, then. Giant sundae it is.”</p><p>Vanessa’s hand tightens around her coffee cup until she hears the crunch of plastic. “Don’t hold back on my account.”</p><p>He doesn’t get the sundae, to her disappointment, but he <em> does </em>get an ice cream cone approximately the size of his head, as well as two bottles of water, one of which he tosses at Vanessa with a pointed look. She takes a sip obligingly, and watches him slurp at his cone while she waits for her small cup of black raspberry. He chases a drip down his hand and wrist, and when he catches her watching, he gives her such a sweet, sheepish smile that she ducks her head and hugs herself again, trying to contain the sunburst struggling out of her chest.</p><p>The picnic tables are full, so they settle in the shady grass beneath a sturdy maple tree. Vanessa slips off her sunhat and sandals and buries her bare feet in the grass, letting it prickle through the thin fabric of her leggings. The breeze plays with her hair, and having something cold to hold onto helps her ground herself. She eats her ice cream in small, measured bites, and between them she tells Ethan about some of the glyphs in<em> that book </em>, explaining how they might help strengthen her charms in an attempt to keep her focus away from the way he’s wolfing his ice cream.</p><p>“They’d be much more powerful alongside a bit of a local creature,” she wheedles as he finishes off the last enormous scoop and bites into his cone. “Like exposure to a local allergen strengthens your immunity to it. Just a bit of your fur, or a few nail clippings! I wouldn’t need much, and it wouldn’t be anything you wouldn’t shed, anyway.”</p><p>Ethan’s expression tumbles into his <em> I should have known </em>smirk. “I already told you, if you want it you’re going to have to take it. I’m not exactly preoccupied with collecting my fur or trimming my nails when I’m running around the neighborhood.”</p><p>“Let me stay while you shift,” she suggests. “I won’t mind. I’m sure I’ve seen much worse.”</p><p>He looks away, scrubbing at the back of his neck with one hand. “No one’s ever really seen me change before.”</p><p>“Never?” she asks with interest, leaning forward, and he shakes his head, stifling a burp in his fist. His stomach is sitting soft in his lap, pushing at the thin fabric of his shirt, and Vanessa tries in vain to keep her shoulders straight against the shudder the sight and sound sends through her. </p><p>“Brain freeze?” he asks, grinning at her, and she furrows her eyebrows and wrinkles her nose at him playfully. “You gotta go slow.”</p><p>“Yes, that seems to have been your philosophy,” she retorts, nodding to the remaining nub of his cone. </p><p>He laughs and crunches down on the last of it, leaning back on his hands in the grass. “Tonight’s a full moon,” he says conversationally, tossing a glance her way. “What’s it now, one?”</p><p>Vanessa shoots him a puzzled look, but checks her watch anyway. “Yes, you have plenty of time.”</p><p>“No, I was just thinking — did I tell you about this? Mrs. Porter and all them, all the old ladies, they’ve been leaving food out on the full moon. I think they caught on that all their casseroles were wearing on me a little after Brona.”</p><p>“So now they leave you dinner,” Vanessa says, on the edge of a mortified laugh she’s afraid sounds vaguely hysterical. “That’s considerate of them.” </p><p>“Not just dinner!” he says, a little theatrically, like he’s enjoying raising this tale for her. “<em> Multiple </em> dinners. Lately it’s been three or four of them, all three nights. I wake up the next day and I can barely move.” He palms his stomach and smiles ruefully. “I need to talk to them about it. It’s getting to be a little much.”</p><p>Vanessa laughs because what <em> else </em> can she do, short of combust?</p><p>Her mind leaps to that <em> other </em> day, months ago now, when she’d been coming down from a summoning, her mind still cracked wide open, every thought and feeling of anyone nearby swimming through her. Ethan had felt so bloated that it had leached into every aspect of his consciousness, his every move behind the counter. She’d caught the hot kick of embarrassment after each stifled belch and the internal groan every time his swollen stomach had bumped the counter. She had nearly boiled every liquid in the cafe trying to regain her composure as she put herself back together on her barstool. Of course he was so all-consumingly full, she thinks now, if he’d eaten <em> multiple dinners </em> . Of course he’s getting chubby if he’s eating <em> multiple dinners </em> for <em> three nights a month </em>. </p><p>“You don’t have to eat all three,” she manages to say despite the wildfire raging through her. “Just because they’re there.”</p><p>He shakes his head. “The wolf doesn’t really think that way. And besides” — he tilts his head at her — “it would be impolite. What if I ate Mrs. Porter’s dinner but not Mrs. Delaney’s? Imagine the <em> gossip </em>, Vanessa! The rift it would cause!”</p><p>“Was it Mrs. Porter’s lawn flamingos you chewed up when you were younger?” she teases, and his cheeks go red. “Or was she the one whose tomatoes you destroyed?”</p><p>“Tomatoes,” he admits, unscrewing the cap from his water and taking a swig. “I had a stomachache for a week. I <em> especially </em>can’t refuse anything she leaves me, it would be such a slight.”</p><p>She takes a long sip of her own water, then another. “You all worry too much about what everyone else thinks,” she says at last, and his eyes crinkle again as he smirks.</p><p>“Says the girl who’s sitting outside in three shades of black in a heat wave for her <em> reputation </em>.”</p><p>He affects her accent — <em> poorly — </em>and she shoves him gently, trying not to think about how soft he is.</p><p>“You’re colorblind,” she reminds him. “You wouldn’t even know if this <em> was </em> three shades of black, which I assure you it is <em> not </em>. I’m very particular about my shades of black.”</p><p>He laughs like she hasn’t heard him laugh since before Brona died, full-out and surprised, and she feels herself grin, too. </p><p>She nudges at his wrist. “They’re just trying to care for you,” she says, offering him the dregs of her ice cream. “Making sure you’re getting enough to eat.”</p><p>He scoffs, taking her cup and wrapping his mouth around the spoon. Vanessa closes her eyes. <em> Silly </em> , she tells herself fiercely. To share like this means <em> nothing </em>. It means friendship. It means anything but what she wants it to.</p><p>“Well,” he says, and she opens her eyes, “it’s working.” He cradles his belly in his hands and squishes it, then smooths a hand over it and tugs the hem of his shirt back down. Vanessa shudders again, though he doesn’t catch it. “I don’t think I’ve ever been <em> cared for </em> so well, from the looks of me.”</p><p>Vanessa smiles shakily, hugging herself. “We like you that way,” she says, trying to imbue the words with Ethan's sure, disarming steadiness.</p><p>He looks between her and the near-empty cup in his hands. “You do, huh?” he asks. There’s something soft in his voice, and Vanessa hangs on his gaze for what feels for too long. A tiny sprout pokes its head through the earth by her hand, and she thumbs at it absently, trying to get herself under control. </p><p>“I might,” she says, dropping her gaze to the grass. It maddens her, that she can hold her own in every situation but this, that she has stared down ghosts and corpses and it is one living, breathing, painfully vital man who undoes her.</p><p>A silence stuffed full of unsaid things sandwiches itself between them. Vanessa uses the condensation from her water to slick back the loose strands of hair escaping her updo. Ethan scrapes at the paper cup with the plastic spoon, tucking the remainder of her ice cream into his mouth. Vanessa thinks that she’d like to be on the other end of that spoon. Food is an intimacy she understands, a language she knows that Ethan speaks too, and she yearns to show him that she can reciprocate, even if she’s clumsy.</p><p>He catches another burp in his fist, and Vanessa snaps back to herself at the sound to see him pressing a hand to his stomach. “That was a lot of ice cream,” he says, and it almost seems as if he’s studying her to see what she makes of the admission.</p><p>Vanessa stares down the fork of her own future. She can go home, fantasize another night without daring to say what she feels. <em>Or</em> — Dr. Seward would tell her that it’s useless to agonize over something this much if she never intends to take a stab at it.</p><p>She takes a deep breath. <em> If you want it, you’re going to have to take it. </em></p><p>“Just think of it as my attempt to care for you,” she says, only a little bit rushed, and, with a varnish of confidence that she hopes he can’t clock her trembling through, she reaches over and pats his stomach. </p><p>Her fingers sink into him, soft, yielding, and she forces herself to look at him even as her face flushes with heat. “Because I do,” she tacks on when he doesn’t say anything. “Care for you.”</p><p>Her feelings are an awful knot, and even Ethan reaching for her hand doesn’t settle anything in her. Even his grip, sure as the line of the sea off the coast, even the line of his pulse, running moon-steady beneath his skin like the tide. </p><p>He says her name softly, and she closes her eyes for the briefest of moments. He leans closer to her, his stomach and sides folding into soft rolls, and, gently, he kisses the side of her head, so tender that for a moment, she can’t breathe. </p><p>“I have to get back to the cafe,” he says, her hand still firmly in his. “To deal with the AC. But if you wanted — if you wanted to come by — any time before nine is probably fine, if you wanted to —?”</p><p>For a moment, it’s disorienting, abrupt. But he kisses the side of her head again, longer, stroking her fingernails with the pad of his thumb, and suddenly it makes perfect sense: food might be Ethan’s primary love language, but magic is Vanessa’s. Magic, and secret shames, and glyphs made ever stronger by shared supernatural bonds. And here he is, its terms unsteady in his mouth. He’s clumsy, but he’s trying, too.</p><p>“I’ll be there,” Vanessa murmurs, pressing her forehead to his. Their hands rest between them, that space of unsaid things suddenly packed full of hope rather than dread.</p><p>They wander closer to each other as they walk back toward the cafe, and Vanessa breaks the slim line of space between them to link her hand with his. His grin down at her is gentle, surprised, and he bumps his hip against hers. She can feel every point where they overlap like joints in a constellation, charged hotter even than the air, and it raises a joy in her that’s so electric she thinks she could power the entire town.</p><p>She hugs him before they part ways, the plush mound of his belly squishing against the flat of her stomach, and she soaks in the sensation, her hands coming around to palm at the chubby curves of his sides. </p><p>“So you <em> do </em>like me this way,” Ethan murmurs down to her, amused, and she smiles against his soft chest, tips her head back to look at him. </p><p>“Don’t tell the old ladies, but I think they’re on to something.”</p><p>When she shows up at his apartment that evening, she hefts the takeout bag in her hand when he answers the door, his smile lighting him up from the inside.</p><p>“What've you got there?” he asks, though the smirk playing on his lips says he already knows.</p><p>Vanessa grins back. “Dinner," she says, meeting his eyes, "<em>and </em>dessert."</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>thank you so much for reading!! as always, feel free to talk to me more about penny dreadful (or anything!) on <a href="http://www.alittlepudge-neverhurtnobody.tumblr.com">tumblr</a>!</p></blockquote></div></div>
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